Set up School Connection

The School Connection app in Microsoft Teams (mobile) empowers parents and guardians to engage, support, and monitor their student's learning at school. On a day-to-day basis, parents and guardians can:

• See upcoming, recently completed, or past due assignments.
• Read assignment feedback, grades, or rubric feedback.
• View insights from the past month on their student’s digital activity, assignment turn-ins, and reading progress.
• Contact a list of educators from their student’s class directory via email.

School Connection is a secure solution that is easy to deploy and provides guardians with information they need to initiate meaningful conversations with their students about their learning. School Connection also saves educators’ time and deepens the partnership between educators and guardians.

Before getting started with School Connection

Class data displayed to guardians (like grades and educator feedback) is a copy of your tenant’s data shared outside of your tenant's data boundary. As such, it's considered customer content that belongs to the guardian.

School Connection is Generally Available (GA) for all regions except Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The GA for these countries are coming later. To access School Connection in these regions, fill the interest form and we'll reach out to you to set it up in private preview. Customers in the European Union (EU) won't have all the data storage and processing occur within the EU during the private preview period.

Tenant admins should ensure that any actions taken related to customer data comply with relevant laws and regulations across all countries/regions. It's the tenant's obligation to fulfill customers' access or deleted requests for personal data that the tenant controls.

Requirements for School Connection

To get the most out of School Connection, educators need to use Teams for Education and the Assignments feature. There's no extra work required for educators to use School Connection.

Parents and guardians can access School Connection using their phone number or their personal email ID, such as Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Gmail, Yahoo, or other providers. Work emails aren't supported for School Connection.

There are three ways in which you can populate each student's guardian contact information. You can select any one of them:

1. School Data Sync: You can ingest contact information via CSV files or via API sync. To learn how to do this, see Sync Parents and Guardian Contacts in SDS. If you want to leverage CSV files for populating the contacts, note that V2.1 is the preferred CSV file format in SDS, and you would need four CSV files: orgs.csv, users.csv, roles.csv, and relationships.csv. Details are available here: SDS V2.1 CSV File Format. If you’d like to first get an overview of SDS instead, see School Data Sync Overview.
2. Parents App: You can select this method if you’ve not set up SDS. An educator can add or edit parent/guardian contact information through a form-based input for each student and request their school admin for approval. Once the admin approves the request, the contact details are updated. For more information, see Manually Update Parent Contact Information.
3. Microsoft Graph: The contact information can be updated in the ‘relatedContact resource type’, and the ‘Update’ API can be used to populate parent/guardian contact information for each student. Learn more here.

While ingesting parent and guardian phone numbers, ensure they're E.164 formatted:

• For example, format phone numbers as +[country code][area code][phone number], like +12223334444.

For any queries, reach out to us at Microsoft Parent Solutions and we're happy to assist you.

Enable School Connection

Once School Data Sync is set up, School Connection can be rolled out in two steps.

Step 1: Enable School Connection in the Teams admin center

1. Sign into the Teams admin center with an account that has global administrator permissions.
2. Navigate to Education Settings > Parent and guardian settings.
3. Find the School Connection toggle, and turn it on.
   1. If you need to, you can block classes in this step.
4. Select Save.

Once you save, it may take up to an hour for the changes to propagate (access or revocation).

Considerations for activating School Connection

Once you turn on School Connection, all guardian contacts you’ve synced can sign into the Microsoft Teams mobile app and add their students to their profile. For more information on this action, see Step 2: Invite parents and guardians to School Connection.

If you make changes to the guardian contacts or the students they correspond to, access will be granted or revoked accordingly. This can take up to an hour to propagate.

School Connection only displays classes that aren't archived, have been activated, and aren't included in the blocklist. Ensure you regularly perform proper SIS hygiene.

Here are some conditions to consider:

• If your school uses SDS to create your class teams, these classes aren't activated by default. Class teams only become active and show up in School Connection after being activated by the respective educator.
• If your school creates class teams outside of SDS, you need to set the isMembershipLimitedToOwners attribute to true to exclude classes you provision from School Connection until activated by an educator.
• If your school allows educators to create and activate class teams on their own, those class teams are activated by default.
• Educators can archive and unarchive class teams as needed.

When you turn on School Connection, the Azure portal creates an administrative unit in the tenant. Find this administrative unit by signing into the Azure portal and filtering the list of administrative units for SchoolConnection.

• Any edits to this administrative unit outside of adding or removing classes could disrupt your School Connection deployment. If you need to populate the blocklist with a large number of classes, use PowerShell. For more information, see Add users, groups, or devices to an administrative unit.

Step 2: Invite parents and guardians to School Connection

As a school admin, you can share the link https://aka.ms/gotoSchoolConnection with parents and guardians to onboard them to the School Connection app in Microsoft Teams (mobile).

This School Connection link can be shared over any communication means which your school already uses to share an announcement with all parents and guardians, such as email, text message, or putting this link up on your official school website. Parents/guardians can simply tap this link on their mobile device to start using School Connection on their Microsoft Teams mobile app.

Once a guardian completes this step, they can engage with the School Connection experience. For parents we've collected a list of FAQs at this link where they can learn more about School Connection.

Parent and guardian experience in School Connection

Here are the steps for parents and guardians to onboard to School Connection:

1. Parents/guardians need to tap on the link https://aka.ms/gotoSchoolConnection on their iOS or Android device to launch School Connection in Microsoft Teams (mobile).
   1. This would redirect them to Microsoft Teams mobile app on their mobile device (if the app is already installed).
   2. If the Teams mobile app isn't already installed on their mobile device, it first takes them to the app store page to complete installation.
2. Next, they need to sign in using a free Microsoft account that matches the phone number or the personal email they have saved with the school.
   1. If they don’t yet have a personal Microsoft account, they can easily create one for free on the Microsoft Teams mobile app or here. Follow the steps on the screen to sign up for a new account.
3. Once they complete the sign-up process, they'll land on the 'Welcome' screen for School Connection. Their next step is to add students to their profile by specifying each student’s school-issued email address.

In scenarios where a parent/guardian would like to use their email to sign up and not their phone number, note that it can be any existing email ID such as Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Gmail, Yahoo, or other providers, but not a Microsoft Entra ID work account since Microsoft Entra ID work email isn't supported by School Connection. Also, creating a new email isn't mandatory to create a personal Microsoft account – they can use their existing personal email or their phone number.

For first-time sign-up, navigating through the link https://aka.ms/gotoSchoolConnection is the recommended approach. Alternately, once a parent/guardian successfully signs in to Microsoft Teams mobile app, they can enable the School Connection app by selecting it from Settings. This pins School Connection for them in Teams, and they can easily find it next to their other Teams apps (for example, Chat, Activity).

Parents and guardians can learn more about School Connection by visiting this link.

Parents and guardians can add students to their profile only if all three of the following requirements are met:

• They use a phone number or a personal email to sign in to the Microsoft Teams mobile app (and not a work email).
• That same phone number or email is listed as a parent/guardian contact with their student’s school.
• School Connection is enabled by the school in Teams Admin Center.

If any of these conditions aren't met, the guardian receives an error.

If a guardian has students at multiple schools, they can add all students to the same profile.

Student data is owned by the school organization. Any requests related to exporting students' information must be raised directly to the school.

Contact us

For any queries, reach out to us at Microsoft Parent Solutions and we are happy to assist you.